Great Circle Associates List-Managers
(January 1997)
 

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Subject: varkey@informationsearch.com
From: James Lick <jlick @ shoreside . com>
Date: Wed, 22 Jan 1997 20:00:04 -0800 (PST)
To: list-managers @ greatcircle . com

bcc'd to spam@zorch

Alert To List Managers,

	Beware of varkey@informationsearch.com and possibly others like 
him.  Joe/Jose Varkey is somehow recieving traffic from a medium-large 
mailing list I run.  Everytime someone posts to the list, he sends that 
person a "business opportunity" e-mail.  Those people have complained to 
him and he has replied that they must unsubscribe from the list to stop 
receiving his mails, and implying that the messages are somehow 
sanctioned by the list manager.

	The bit problem is that he is being very crafty.  He is not on 
the list directly, and I can find no connection so far between any list 
member and Jose.  There are not any obvious exploder addresses on the 
list.  Jose has dodged helping me remove him from the list.  I sent him a 
request for him to send me the headers of the message from the list.  He 
responded that he had already sent one and deleted it.  I checked my 
sendmail logs for the entire month and found only one message being 
received from him, the one saying he already sent the information.

	I've also run an audit of the entire list sending a personalized 
message to each list member which shows what address they are receiving 
mail on, then I sent a message to Jose asking that he please return the 
copy he gets.  I have a few other tricks to try, but this is proving very 
frustrating.

	This also hilights another possible abuse by spammers.  They can 
subscribe to lists under stealth addresses which forward to a spamming 
address and hooked to an address collector.  This guy was stupid enough 
to report where he is getting the addresses from, but a less inept 
spammer could do the same thing and be nearly untraceable and very little 
the list manager can do.

	If anyone else is experiencing problems with this particular 
fellow, I'd love to compare address lists to find out where this is 
coming from.

-- James Lick -- jlick@drivel.com -- http://drivel.com/jlick/ --




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